The Anteater of Death

by Betty Webb

  “You look perfect.” Caro said. Obviously, not only men suffered from color-blindness. She grabbed a brush and began to rearrange my hair.

  My mother was almost as beautiful as she had been thirty-four years earlier when she’d won the title of Miss San Sebastian County and fell in love with my father, one of the judges. After their marriage ended, facelifts kept her looking young enough to snag several more husbands.

  Once she had rearranged my hair into a style more to her liking, I pulled away. “Can we go back downstairs now? I’m starved.”

  The shifty look in her eyes reminded me of the evening’s true agenda: fixing up her daughter with an eligible bachelor. “I want you to look especiall nice this evening. Maybe a quick manicure. I have some lovely...”

  I hurried out the door.

  Downstairs, while gobbling canapés, I saw a dark-haired man I didn’t recognize hovering with others around the drinks table. Handsome, of what my mother would call “marriageable age,” and from the appearance of his hand-tailored suit, the possessor of a marriageable bank account. I felt like a prize pig on an auction block but consoled myself thinking that he probably felt the same way.

  Attempting to put off the encounter as long as possible, I loaded up a plate and headed for the French doors that overlooked the harbor. The sun sank toward the Pacific, casting a pink glow over everything. If I craned my neck to the left, I could almost see the lights of the fourteenth century castle that old Edwin Gunn, the family patriarch and the zoo’s founder, had transported block-by-block from Scotland a hundred years ago. When I looked to the right, I could see all the way down to the harbor and Slip No.34, where the Merilee bobbed on the incoming tide. How I longed to be there.

  “Teddy, I’d like to introduce you to Sheridan Parker, of the Santa Barbara Parkers. He’s living in San Francisco now.” With those ominous words, Caro disappeared into a crowd of dinner guests, most of whom were members of the Zoo Guild. From their boisterous laughter, I guessed they’d already recovered from Grayson’s untimely demise.

  I bared my teeth at Parker. “Nice to meet you.”

  His smile was no more genuine than mine. “The same.”

  My gay-dar, a sixth sense Caro didn’t share, signaled that he was not the eligible bachelor she assumed. His mother probably had cajoled him into this meeting, too. Gay, straight, it never made any difference. No matter who or what you were, mothers never gave up trying to change their children, probably a genetically linked trait.

  My compassion activated toward a fellow sufferer, I offered a real smile and shifted the conversation to a neutral topic. “Did you know someone was killed at the Gunn Zoo last night?”

  He perked up. “It’s the talk of the Castro. Grayson Harrill, husband of one of the Gunn girls, right?”

  Way to go, Caro. The Castro’s only the largest gay neighborhood in the U.S. Guess you missed that part of the tour. “Yep, that’s the guy. He was shot.”

  “The story I heard must be wrong, then, that the pregnant anteater attacked him. I hope she’s okay. And her baby.”

  Too bad Sheridan was gay. He was my kind of guy. “They’re both fine.”

  He finished what was left of his drink. At these get-togethers, Caro always served wine from Gunn Vineyard. “Strange place to shoot somebody, at a zoo.”

  “Not really. After the gates close, the only person around is a park ranger. The big cats roar all night, too, which might cover the sounds of any gunshots.”

  “Then I’ll be sure to plan my next murder there. But if the anteater didn’t do it, who did? The wife?”

  “Jeanette?” Despite the seriousness of the situation, I laughed. “She’s eccentric, but as for shooting someone, I can’t see it. She was nuts about her husband and he felt the same way about her.”

  The maid arrived with two glasses of Chardonnay. I took a sip. Yep. Gunn Vineyard, and judging from the too-strong oak, an ’05. Good German Rieslings were more my speed, but on my salary, I took what I could get.

  Sheridan didn’t seem to mind the over-oak, even gave an approving nod after a sip. “I only met them once, and I have to agree with you. They seemed devoted to each other. But if not the wife, who?”

  Good question. “You met them? Where?”

  “In the City. I’m with Braunstein, Steele, and Mohan. That’s all I can say about it, though.”

  A business meeting, then. The very fact that Grayson and the almost-housebound Jeanette had made the ninety-mile drive to San Francisco to transact some hush-hush business made me curious. Did they belong to the faction attempting to break the Gunn Trust? I hadn’t bothered to keep up on who wanted to retain the status quo and who preferred to take the money and run. The only thing I knew was that until this past year, the Trust had been considered unbreakable.

  Before Edwin Gunn died on safari in Africa in 1935, he set up the Gunn Trust to ensure that his twenty-five-hundred acre inland estate would be kept intact for his six children and their descendants. Included in the Trust were the zoo, the vineyard with its attached winery, and the magnificent Gunn Castle, where much of the family still lived.

  Over the years the estate had increased dramatically in value, as had the Trust’s investments, earning the descendants sizeable dividend checks. Now some of the great-grandchildren wanted to cash out. One of the Gunn maids told my mother’s maid that the family dinners had become so acrimonious that most of the aspiring Trust-breakers had decamped to San Francisco or Carmel. To the discomfort of the Trust loyalists and especially Aster Edwina Gunn, Edwin’s sole surviving child, a few rebels remained.

  I took another sip of my Chardonnay and pretended approval. “Nice. Braunstein, Steele and Mohan, hmm? Are they attorneys or...?”

  “Yes, attorneys.”

  “Criminal? Accident?” When I saw no reaction, I added, “Divorce?”

  “Trust attorneys.”

  “Jeanette and Grayson were part of the group trying to break the Gunn Trust?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Of course you didn’t. But just as a matter of conversation, do you think the Trust can be broken? I heard that one of the sons tried it back in the Fifties and failed. Then he went away to invent TV dinners or something.”

  Sheridan nodded. “That was one heir against the others. Now fifteen Gunns want to dissolve the Trust. To make matters even more interesting, several of the remaining twenty-three are reconsidering their positions. I’m giving no private information away, you understad. The Examiner published those numbers and suppositions a couple of months ago.”

  I noticed he didn’t say the numbers and suppositions were incorrect. Alarmed, I said, “What happens to the zoo if the rebels are successful?” I wanted to kick myself for not staying better informed.

  His eyes were wary. “Any particular reason you’re asking?” “I work there.”

  “Oh. When your mother said you had something to do with animals. I thought you were a horse trainer, hunter-jumper sort of thing. So you’re a vet?”

  “A zookeeper.”

  To his credit he didn’t look shocked at my lowly title. “Lucky you, doing what you love. It must be nice being outdoors all day instead of being stuck in some office.”

  Belatedly realizing he hadn’t answered my question, he was that wily, I repeated it. “If the Gunn Trust is broken, could it mean the end of the zoo? At five miles inland, it’s not protected by the California Coastal Initiative.”

  He took a deep breath. He shuffled his feet. He looked down at the carpet. “Maybe not.”

  Never had the word “maybe” sounded so scary.

  “Surely the zoo wouldn’t be broken up!” What would happen to my animal friends then? Would they be replaced by developers who couldn’t tell a Balearic Shearwater chick from a Hispaniolan galliwasp lizard?

  He still couldn’t look at me. “Trimmed down in size, maybe.”

  In other words, another Eden lost.

  Chapter Five

  My conversation with the zoo dir
ector didn’t go as planned.

  When I entered the administration building the next morning, Helen Gifford, his secretary, informed me he had a visitor. “A woman with money,” she whispered, looking at the director’s closed door. “Absolutely dripping with diamonds.” She motioned me to a chair next to a table heaped high with magazines. “It shouldn’t take too long. He’s pretty fast when it comes to squeezing money out of women.”

  I started leafing through a copy of National Geographic, but, horrified by photographs of poached mountain gorillas and their severed heads and hands, quickly put it down.

  To get my mind off the images, I asked, “You like working for Barry Fields?”

  She shrugged. “Since I’m over sixty, I haven’t had any trouble with him.”

  Before I could ask what she meant, the office door opened and the aged Lorena Haskell Anders, widow of P. Stephen Anders, who’d founded a national chain of sports outfitters, emerged. A beaming Barry Fields followed behind, wearing a different Armani sports coat than yesterday’s. How many did he have?

  A ten-carat rock weighed down one of the widow’s wrinkled finger, rings with fractionally smaller stones encircled around the others. On her dewlapped neck, a diamond-and-sapphire necklace rose and fell with each breath. Fields’ pitch on behalf of the zoo must have been successful, because she still held her checkbook in her hand.

  Upon spotting me, Mrs. Anders gave me an air kiss. “How nice to see you, Theodora! I heard you were working at the zoo, but couldn’t quite believe it. Yet here you are. How’s your mother?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “So sad about Grayson. Jeanette must be crushed. Have you tendered your condolences yet? I know you two used to be great friends.”

  There was no point in correcting her. “I plan to visit as soon as I get off work. She...”

  Fields shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking anxious. Perhaps he feared that if the widow didn’t leave soon, she’d reconsider her contribution. He cast me a look of annoyance. “Do you want something?”

  “Yes, I...”

  “Wait in my office.” He slipped his arm around Mrs. Anders, gave her a peck on the cheek, and escorted her to the door. “Call me anytime,” he purred. “I’m never too busy to talk to beautiful women.”

  Giggling, she left.

  ***

  Ten minutes later I emerged from the director’s office in defeat. While he’d agreed that the anteater had been proven innocent of murder, he still insisted she’d shown her true nature in her post mortem attack and needed to be confined to the holding pen until the zoo board handed down its decision. My argument that the zoo housed many Code Red animals—and in fact, that was what zoos were for—fell on deaf ears.

  Frustrated, I left the administration building and headed for the animals’ commissary, where I found the other keepers talking about the murder as they loaded lettuce and worms onto their zoo carts. Zorah wondered aloud what Grayson was doing at the anteater’s enclosure.

  “Maybe he wanted to see how her pregnancy was progressing.” This from Jack Spence, the bear keeper.

  Zorah sniffed. “Not with his fear of animals. Remember how he acted with that little saki?”

  A big woman in both height and girth, she seemed more harassed than ever. Her dark brown hair looked like it hadn’t been combed in days and she’d inadvertently splashed zoo goo across the front of her khaki uniform. As she picked up another container of mealy worms for the frilled lizards, she mused, “I was too busy serving drinks in that stupid anteater costume to keep an eye on Grayson. Damn Barry, making us dress in animal drag! Where’s the dignity?”

  She had a masters degree in animal husbandry but had been edged out of the zoo director position by the business-wise, animal-ignorant Barry Fields. It made her more alert to affronts to her dignity than was normal for a poop-scooping zookeeper. When the directive came down that everyone assigned to work the fundraiser must wear an anteater costume in honor of Lucy’s pregnancy, her complaints had been loud and long. Her argument that the costume’s long nose might flop into the drinks went unheeded.

  Just like my pleas for Lucy’s freedom.

  I grabbed a tray of meat for the Mexican gray wolves and set it inside my cart next to a Tupperware container of termites. “I’d forgotten about the costumes. Did you tell the sheriff about them?”

  “Of course,” she replied. “I also told him Grayson partied pretty hard before ... Well, before.”

  There had been rumors Grayson had a drinking problem, which might explain why he’d been foolish enough to enter the deep foliage of Tropics Trail by himself. Or allowed his killer to lead him there. “If he was drunk, he might have said something to upset anyone.”

  “I wouldn’t know. He sure wasn’t the only drunk around. By the end of the evening half the guests were in the bag, including our esteemed director.”

  We worked in silence for a while, but as I climbed into my zoo cart, Zorah called, “Hey, why wasn’t your mom at the fundraiser? She’s never missed one before.”

  I had put Caro’s absence to the back of my mind. I decided to ask her again, hoping she’d break down and tell me the truth. The chances weren’t good, though. After being married so many times to so many different kinds of men, she’d learned to fib whenever it suited her purposes.

  “Who knows why Caro does or doesn’t do anything?”

  Zorah’s scowl disappeared, replaced by a warm smile. “Yeah. Your mom’s an original. It must be fun being her daughter.”

  “It’s an adventure, all right.” On that note, I started my electric cart and began my morning rounds.

  First Lucy, who didn’t understand why she couldn’t enter her big enclosure, then the squirrel monkeys, the Chacoan peccary, the capybara, and last but definitely not least, the Mexican gray wolves I’d temporarily inherited while their regular keeper was on vacation. On my way to the wolves, the Collie’s magpie jay gave a big squawk and flew to the front of the large aviary to see me. I stopped to say hello.

  “Good morning, Carlos. How’s my favorite cuckoo bird?”

  As beautiful as he was, with his royal blue and ebony plumage, the bird was clearly demented. For some obscure reason known only to his tiny avian mind, he had been trying to coax me into mating with him. Every day he offered me a twig to help him build our honeymoon suite. As I approached the aviary, Carlos stuck today’s twig through the grid while mimicking the call of the Asian fairy bluebird on the perch behind him.

  “Silly Carlos is a love-addled fool.”

  Delighted by my response, the magpie tilted his head, raised his crest, and pushed the twig out further. Touched, I took it. It’s nice to be loved, even if only by a confused bird.

  In an attempt to lure me into the aviary, he began running through his entire repertoire.

  “Whit-wheet!” Curved bill thrasher.

  “Bzzz-zzzz-zzzz!” Bluebird of paradise.

  “Eine-eine-eine!” Black-backed gull.

  “Sweet-sweet-sweet!” Yellow warbler.

  “Flattery will get you everywhere, my man.” I put my nose up to the aviary mesh and let him peck tenderly at my freckles. “Sweet-sweet-sweet,” I mimicked back. “Carlos is a sweet, sweet bird.”

  He closed his eyes in ecstasy.

  I stuck my finger through the mesh and scratched his white chest. “Yes, a sweet, sweet, sweet bird.”

  “Boom-boom-boom!” Double-wattled cassowary.

  I gave his breast a final scratch. “You had me at ‘Hello,’ handsome.”

  Followed by his anguished shrieks—White-crowned fork-tail—I hopped back in my cart and continued on my rounds.

  ***

  Four hours later, tummies fed and offal shoveled, I was taking a break in the staff lounge when I saw the sheriff heading up the path. The other keepers grinned at me but I tried to ignore them.

  “Thought I’d catch you here,” His warm smile made things worse.

  Behind him, a keeper pretended to play a tiny violin. My former rel
ationship with Joe Rejas had always been fodder for zoo gossip.

  “Yep, this is where I am every day around this time, unless someone murders someone.”

  The minute the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. The phrase was an old zookeeper’s joke, meant to describe the carnivorous behavior of some of our charges, but in light of Grayson’s death, it sounded in terrible taste.

  “What is it you want, Sheriff?” I emphasized his title, thus alerting the eavesdroppers that this was no personal visit.

  “We need to speak in private.”